John Barry 1933-2011

The secret ingredient in the James Bond series

John Barry 1933-2011

It would take a secret agent with an obsessive interest in film music to settle, for good, the authorship question dogging one of the most indelible themes known to cinema.

Meantime let us pay tribute to Barry — John Barry. The five-time Academy Award-winning composer and musician, 77, died Sunday of a heart attack. For decades the authorship of the 103-second masterpiece that will forever remain Barry's signature achievement, the "James Bond Theme" introduced in first Bond film, "Dr. No" (1962), has been a matter of dispute.

The credited composer was Monty Norman, who by most accounts wrote the theme that launched a thousand parodies. The theme apparently was, in part, self-plagiarized from a song in the forgotten stage musical "Bad Sign, Good Sign," co-written by Norman.

Barry, who scored 10 more Bond films in addition to "The Lion in Winter," "Out of Africa" and others, was hired initially by the Bond producers to replace Norman as the "Dr. No" composer, and to punch up Norman's "James Bond Theme." That he did. Barry arranged it in the style of his own pre-Bond records, giving it an overlay of headlong, irresistible danger. Burt Rhodes is the credited orchestrator, though the way the brass wails throughout the theme, it sounds very much like Barry's handiwork. (In general the arranger decides which notes are to be played in what order; the orchestrator decides which instruments will play what notes. And there's your musicology lesson for the day.)

The "Dr. No" musical authorship conundrum is especially confusing: Barry, uncredited, ended up composing nearly all the film's soundtrack, but the film's original soundtrack album included mostly Norman's music (unused in the picture). The theme, as written, arranged and orchestrated, probably was the work of three different men. The results were brilliant. Danger is the Bond theme's middle name. As finessed by Barry, it is the essence of imperialist, Cold War-era swagger, the opening, snaky guitar line contrasting perfectly with the more traditional orchestral flourishes a few bars later.

Barry won five Oscars, for the film scores of "Born Free" (1966); "The Lion in Winter" (1968); "Out of Africa" (1985) and "Dances With Wolves" (1990), as well as the peerlessly drippy title tune (lyrics by Don Black) for "Born Free." Much of his scoring can be characterized as reliably, sentimentally solid (and sometimes stolid). Much of it carried a lugubrious streak, such as the themes heard in the equally lugubrious biopic "Chaplin."

But Barry's contribution to the Bond pictures was something else. Is it reductive or absurd to claim that for all Barry's assignments and Oscars, across epics and intimate pictures alike, his peak achievement came in the arrangement of Norman's "James Bond Theme" (which Barry sometimes claimed, in ambiguous language, as his own)?

I think not. Questions of authorship sometimes have a way of turning into drilling expeditions that come up dry. But Barry's arrangement for the music we will forever associate with 007 transcends all previous known definitions of danger. By doing what he did to the "James Bond Theme," whoever wrote it or rewrote it, Barry did eternal honor to the crucial middle step between composition and orchestration.

Throw in Sean Connery and a license to kill and you have the sound, the aura, of movie history being made.